i'm a little bit late to this thread, but i figured i should still offer my thoughts. basically, my principal thought is this:
i don't really think that this announcement changes anything very much.
in particular, the announcement about the emphasis on meaning is not really very significant at all -- because SC has
always been about meaning. in fact, as i have said in hundreds, if not thousands, of posts on this forum,
every major error type on SC is already associated with meaning.
two things:
1/
here's a more comprehensive summary of my thoughts on this particular subject:
https://www.beatthegmat.com/companies-in ... tml#367679
2/
if anyone out there is still thinking that you could even
have SC without grammar -- consider the following question:
WHAT IS grammar?
...
...
if you think about this question for a while, you will probably come up with something to the effect of "a set of rules designed to make sentences
express their intended meaning more clearly".
in other words,
without the meaning of the sentence, grammar doesn't even exist. so, gmac's announcement is pretty much just telling us what we already know.
the reason this isn't anything new is that the gmat doesn't test -- and NEVER has tested -- the parts of the english language that
don't use meaning. for instance, this test has never, ever, ever tested things like word order and spelling, which are essentially arbitrary and not meaning-based.
--
the only sense in which this announcement is significant is its confirmation of the idea that idioms are not worth memorizing,
except inasmuch as they change the meaning of the sentence.
so, for all of you who have just committed long list of idioms to memory without understanding how to use them, tough luck -- time to start over from scratch with the same lists, but this time learning what the idioms actually
signify in terms of meaning.
Ron has been teaching various standardized tests for 20 years.
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